The trend I’ve noticed resembles nearly every liberal response to conservative arguments that I’ve seen in the past year, as illustrated by the above-mentioned article [the reader quotes directly from it in his numbered points below — RD]:

1. The conservative claim in question is bad, and therefore wrong, because it will enable Trump and the alt-right. “You’re going to hear a lot about him in the coming weeks: he’ll probably be a star guest on alt-right shows and the rightwing lecture circuit, splashed on the front covers of conservative magazines, no doubt before a lucrative book deal about his martyrdom and what it says about the Liberal Big Brother Anti-White Man Thought Police.”

2. State factual claims made by the conservative with simple incredulity. Don’t refute them, just state them as if they were self-evidently bad, and therefore wrong: ‘But men and women are simply biologically different, he argues: women have a “stronger interest in people rather than things’, and that their alleged neuroticism and attachment to cooperation makes them less suitable as coders, compared to men who apparently inherently value competition and systematizing.”

3. Allege that the entire swath of claims made are pseudoscience and obviously false by picking one part of a complex and lengthy argument, attacking that single part, and proclaiming victory over the whole thing: “Damore’s assertions about gender are, frankly, guff dressed up with pseudo-scientific jargon: not just belittling women, but reducing men to the status of unemotional individualistic robots. But as Yonatan Zunger – until recently a senior Google employee – puts it, those men could not be good engineers. ‘Engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers,’ as Zunger puts it. Yes, he notes, women are ‘socialised to be better’ (note, not genetically pre-programmed) “at paying attention to people’s emotional needs and so on” – but this makes for better engineers.”

4. When all else fails, state the allegations from conservatives that actions like Damore’s firing represent suppression of free speech, and respond by arguing that the historically oppressive power dynamic against minorities means that suppression of conservative male speech is justifiable: “‘Political correctness gone mad’, ‘you can’t say what you think any more’: these cliches underpin Damore’s manifesto, even though he refers to them fancily as Google’s ‘ideological echo chamber’. But he’s wrong. These movements have been liberating, not repressive.”

But who’s the joke on here? The Left is always (rightly) labeling Trump as a symptom of our post-truth society, in that he makes wild and utterly false statements on a regular basis with relative impunity. It seems to me, however, that the essence of being post-truth is making or attacking an opinion or truth claim on some grounds other than its factual merits. And by that definition, the Guardian article is just as much an instance of post-truth balderdash as Trump.

Damore cited one social science result after another in justification of his claims. The Guardian article makes no effort to refute any of them, because the truth or falsehood of these results is fundamentally beside the point. It doesn’t matter, for instance, whether or not social science indicates that women have higher neuroticism measures than men (and they do). What matters is that such a claim, irrespective of its truth, serves to bolster the white male supremacist bourgeoisie narrative over and against the liberationist narrative, and must therefore be suppressed.

The reaction to Damore’s firing is about as clear an illustration to me as you could ask for that the Left, just like the alt-right, regards truth in a Nietzschean fashion: truth is simply a social construct designed to serve the ends of power. What Alasdair MacIntyre said in After Virtue of ethical claims ultimately has come to be true of factual claims in general. They are uttered as if they corresponded to an objective, mind-independent reality, but in fact their meaning is something entirely different — the expression of a will to power by this or that extremist group.

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60 Responses to The Left & Weaponizing ‘Truth’

“Progressivism revolves around the idea of systematic oppression of specific groups”

Gee whiz, so the oppressionists aka intersectionalists have laid their hands on progressivism too? What can an open-minded forward-looking tolerant person call himself? Loaf of bread. I’m just a loaf of – oh no, the antiglutenists are after me!

Please note that once upon a time Canada was home to a fine, respectable and highly accomplished party called the Progressive Conservatives. They were not what you describe. I wish they would come back.

Beyond that, institutions probably have an inherent interest in diversity. What this really means is that they have an inherent interest in drawing from the widest possible pool of talent. If there are top-notch investment bankers coming out of Senegal or Bulgaria, then investment banks want them. If there are top-notch mathematicians in China or Bangladesh, then universities want them.

This is the ideological case for “diversity.” But what if – out of a misguided sense of egalitarianism – we say, investment banks should have a certain percentage of Senegalians (?) or Bulgarians even if the bankers of this heritage they are able to find aren’t as qualified as other candidates?

Same for the universities; perhaps they’ve decided (as many apparently have) that they need to increase the number of Chinese or Bangladeshi mathematicians, period – and are willing to accept lower standards in order to get them?

You can prioritize diversity or you can prioritize excellence. Advocates of diversity may insist that the former necessarily delivers the latters. I’ve seen too many real-life cases where that simply wasn’t the case.

You CAN prioritize both, but it takes a different approach. SOME people from “under-represented” demographics will excel, but if we’re talking about historic deprivation in social and financial capital, being relegated to sub-standard schools, etc., then the deal has to be something like, we’re making a special point of admitting you, because you have the potential to handle it, but you are a little behind many others we’re admitting. We have staff dedicated to giving you extra help, but its going to take some hard work on your part. And you could end up four years later summa cum laude.

That’s different from admitting people and then letting them float because oh, they have so many structural oppressions in their background, we don’t really expect them to get A’s. We need to learn more from Dr. Charles Drew, who in addition to synthesizing a variety of extant lines of research into a workable process for banking donated blood, was on the faculty of Howard University Medical School. He devoted endless hours to helping students who were struggling, but utlimately, they had to make the grade, or he would fail them.

California, btw, has a law prohibiting discrimination based on political views. Now, I imagine that Google is actually based in the Lesser Antilles for tax purposes, but as their HQ is in San Francisco, that might come into play.

Its been a while, but on this point I am in complete agreement with M_Young.

You don’t get to make a stink in your workplace, insult a sizable percentage of your co-workers, and then whine about how MEEAAAN everyone is to you when you get fired.

Why not?

I suspect that he will ride the “white men are victims of those evil feminazis” train here on in.

Conjectural.

But you are right about the whining.

And, if Damore had been covered by a collective bargaining agreement, he almost certainly would not have been terminated.

Unionize Google! I can see the mass picket line at the Google-Plex, and all the old lines about Henry Ford, GM, Republic Steel, being pulled out and directed at the top brass of Google. Who’s progressive NOW?

I do recall an op-ed humor piece some decades back exploring why 99.9 percent of those indicted in the Savings and Loan scandal were white males. The article speculated that perhaps there is something about the upbringing of white males that induces a reflexive propensity for spending large amounts of other people’s money.

It was funny. I enjoyed reading it. And it made a valid point, the stats being what they were.

I would also note this. At the same time I was reading The Bell Curve (because an African American editor insisted that I write something meaningful about it for a larger article), I ran across something about another social scientist named Jenner, who got into trouble twenty or thirty years earlier for research concluding Head Start was a waste of money because the black kids couldn’t learn anyway. His findings were a bit more nuanced than that, but they stirred up quite a storm. Well, later on he did some research which found that in black families in north Georgia, older siblings invariably had lower IQs than younger siblings, suggesting that something about growing up black in north Georgia tends to depress the IQ one is born with.

So there is a lot still to discuss.

I may have Jenner’s name wrong. I tried to google the research, but all I got was rabid screeds about how Rachel Dolezal is not Caitlyn Jenner. I agree — Caitlyn Jenner is a mockery and Rachel Dolezal did a fine job as local NAACP president. But I think the article meant it the other way around — sex is fluid but you can’t pick your race because its immutable. Go figure. By the way, my next door neighbor, a Roman Catholic because her father was Haitian, agrees with me on Dolezal.

Of nations with majority white populations, see above. Of nations with majority non-white populations, see my reference to the 15th Century below. The governments of the most economically and socially advanced non-white countries today are not led by white males.

“White male dominance” outside of Europe and the Middle East – Roman and Greek dominance of the latter lasted for about 1,000 years, ending in the 7th Century A.D. (I’m old school, so no B.C.E or C.E. for this Red atheist) – only developed after the 15th Century. After 200 years, the dominance of “white males” – it’s more accurate to say of U.S. and European capitalist imperialism – over East Asia is slipping and is starting to slip away in South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

eddie too says: “why is it that cultures and societies led by white males have excelled in building prosperity and advancing science?”

Well, societies led by Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Aryans in Iran and India, South Indians, Native Americans, Arabs, Moors, Turks and the Chinese also built prosperous societies that advanced science. The phenomenon is not exclusive to white people or societies led by white males.

“Well, societies led by Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Aryans in Iran and India, South Indians, Native Americans, Arabs, Moors, Turks and the Chinese also built prosperous societies that advanced science. The phenomenon is not exclusive to white people or societies led by white males.”

Try “The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West” by Toby Huff. He shows how the cultural, religious and legal legacy of the West (esp Greeks) meant that modern science rose in the West and West only. China and Islam may have had some technology that the West did not, but that isn’t the same thing as Science.

I’m a liberal and get tired of it being assumed that I share the opinions of a bunch of college kids and radicals. I don’t like it any more than you would like it if I used Kim Davis, Westboro Baptist Church and Neo-Nazis as personifying the right. It’s a straw man. I have lots of liberal friends and I don’t know a single one of them, except a couple of 20 year olds that hold the opinions that you are laying on us. If you wrote and article and distinguished between the left and the far left, your article would be relevant but if you don’t make that distinction, then it just simply isn’t. Perhaps you might take the time to discover what we actually think instead of putting words in your mouths. Don’t be part of the problem and then blame it all on us. As to what diversity means. I it’s just an umbrella term that has lost it’s meaning, it’s an intellectually lazy word just like ‘the left’ is an intellectually lazy word. But by all means, lets all just babble on.

Calling ancient Greece “Western” does a lot of heavy lifting… since the Anglo-Saxons are no more and no less the heirs of ancient Greece than are the Arab Caliphates. Indeed, medieval Greece was not noted for its contributions to science, any more than the Arabian peninsula was a power in the Muslim world after the Quraysh and other Meccan clans relocated to more congenial parts of their new empire.

But Toby Huff may be right in the same sense that domestication of horses emerged in central Asia around 2000 BC, or that banana cultivation began in south-east Asia. Most human discoveries began somewhere and spread from there by trade, conquest, migration, or cultural assimilation.